Heart-Leaf Philodendron Revival (Part 1)

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So today is part one of Philodendron Heterocym Revival. This is the heart leaf philodendron here. You can see that the leaves have a heart shape on them; it’s sometimes confused with the pothos, but this isn’t a pothos—this is a philodendron; it’s a whole different plant. It is a tropical evergreen trailing or climbing vine that grows up to about 13 feet tall in the jungles, and in your home, it can actually get to be a pretty nice plant as well.

This one’s going to be revived. When I got it, it was planted too low in the pot. So I’m going to be reviving it. I have a video on how planting too low in the pot is not a great idea. It’s also been droughted a few times, so it is definitely ready for a new pot, ready for some revival, and ready for some good soil because it’s been in the same soil for a long time.

As mentioned, this plant has beautiful heart-shaped leaves; this is a lime green variety. There are also darker green varieties or even some with variegated foliage on them as well. They’re very easy to grow if you’ve got them in good soil and you give them medium light. They like medium light but will tolerate some lower light. They prefer average indoor temperatures, and they also like a little humidity, but they can also tolerate a lot of dry air too, so they’re pretty versatile in that sense.

They are very pretty, versatile plants to grow in your indoor garden. They don’t often get pests and diseases; rarely do they. So that’s another great thing about them. They can also be trained; they can either be used as a trailing plant, which you can see looks very pretty, trailing, or you can put them in a trellis system and wind their foliage, their vines, through the trellis, which can be very attractive as well. You do need to wind them in and attach them a little bit when you do the trellising because they don’t have little tendrils that will attach. In the tropics, they tend to keep growing, and they will just keep growing.

In terms of watering, you want to water them when they are approaching dryness, about a four on the moisture meter. If you have a moisture meter that starts at four, that means it is still a little bit moist. Usually, one, two, and three are dry, so you want to aim for the four range or so. You don’t want to overwater them because they will get root rot, but you do not want to underwater them either. They are plants that can spring back from being droughted, but they will lose some of their leaves, which will give you areas of the vine that don’t have any leaves, and that’s not as attractive. So, do try to keep them well watered as they need it.

Okay, so we’re going to revive this guy here today. The first step in revival, generally, well, first of all, I watered him really well yesterday to get him ready because I don’t want to shock him. If you are going to try to revive a plant and you haven’t watered it yet, you do want to water it and give it at least an hour before you go ahead and repot it. This will allow the plant to soak up a little moisture. You want the leaves to have some moisture in them when you repot because what happens when you repot a plant is that the plant does become a little bit shocked. It will have some transplant shock going on, and when it does that, it’s not going to take up water. So you want the plant to be hydrated before it goes into this little period of time, which can be several days or even a week or two, where it’s not really taking up much water.

I’ve also pre-moistened the soil here. I have this pro-mix that I like for houseplants, for potting for container growing. It’s one of my favorites. It has moisture-retentive properties but also has some draining agents. However, I usually add a little bit more pumice, which is—I’ll leave the link to this—my pumice that I carry. You can also get it from other places. That gives you some nice drainage. We do want the philodendron to have good drainage because what happens with drainage is it gets a little bit of air to the root zone. You don’t want too much air in the root zone because then the roots will dry out, but the roots are living things, and they do need a little bit of air to thrive.

I’m going to also add some worm castings. I have videos on how great that is. I’m going to add a little bit more to this. This soil has some in there, I believe, but I’m adding some more. I am also going to add a little bit of my green gourmet houseplant food, which I will leave a link for as well, and add some of that to this too. This soil was pre-moistened. You don’t want it soggy, but you don’t want to plant in dry soil because what happens when you plant in dry soil is that when you water, the soil will sink, and you won’t have enough soil for the plant.

So I’m going to mix it up into the already moistened soil. You want it moist but not soggy, so when you make a ball with the soil, it should be the consistency that if you make a ball with this soil, you could easily break it. You don’t want it dripping with water, so if you do add more potting soil, you can dry it out or wait until it dries out before you plant in it. But then again, if it was dry, it would not make a ball at all.

Okay, so I’ve done that mixing, and now we’ve got the soil ready. Now we have the tricky part of figuring out what size pot I need. I do have a repotting series, and I have a couple of videos on choosing pots. So I have chosen a few here. You can see these different sizes, and you may be looking at some of these and thinking, “Oh my gosh, it’s really small.” Well, first of all, we’re reviving a plant. A lot of plants that need revival, this one doesn’t show signs of root rot, but a lot of times when you are reviving a plant, it may be suffering from some root rot syndrome, so you definitely don’t want to put it into too big of a pot.

If you’ve been watching my videos, you will see that I talk frequently about the secret to good healthy growth: that is two-thirds plant to one-third pot. That being said, this little plant that doesn’t have a whole bunch of soil in there probably doesn’t have a lot of roots, so I’m not going to be putting it in a big pot. In order to determine what size pot I need, I’m going to need to look at the root zone as well.

So I chose some; I have some selections, and sometimes you may end up putting it back in the pot that it was in, especially if it’s sunk. You can do that as well because it’s not using all that space effectively. So I’m going to take it out gently. This one’s coming out pretty easy.

Okay, now you can see here we don’t have—this is old soil, and I’m reviving; I’m not going to mix it in with the good soil. You can see we don’t have a whole bunch of roots going on here because for one thing, there wasn’t a whole bunch of soil, and that was one of the problems with the plant was having—why it needs a revival. So I’m going to take off a little more here.

When a plant has been in a pot too long, too, with something that will also happen is a lot of salt buildup, salinity buildup, and that’s not good for plants. I have a video on that as well. So this is another good reason to repot the plant and also to take off some of this excess. Don’t go too crazy; you don’t want to shock the plant, but take off a little.

Well, I wasn’t sure when I started, but I’m thinking that this pot here is going to be the good pot for this plant because of this very small root mass. It actually was a cup, but it has a drainage hole in it now, and I’m going to put a drainage screen on there. It’s actually drywall tape I like to use so that the soil won’t fall out of that drainage hole. You always want to plant in a pot with a drainage hole.

We could also go with this one, which actually looks really cool with the color—the green and the green—so this is another option. But another thing you want to do is look inside the pot. How much more soil are you putting in? You don’t want to put in any more than double the amount of soil that the plant came from.

So I can go with either one of these; they’re going to be similar. They’re very similar, but I am thinking this one has a little bit less soil, so I’m going to go with this one. I want to be on the safe side, and it’ll still look really cool; it’s got little frogs on it. You put in at least about an inch or so of soil, and I may want a little bit more.

This was very deep before; I’m not going to be putting a lot of soil around the outside. The roots will probably go down more, but there will be some on the outside as well because you do want to have extra soil on the outside as well as on the bottom.

So we’re just going to go ahead and put it in here. We’re going to make sure it’s sitting at about the same depth it was before; that’s very important. So we’re looking at that; we want it to sit nice and high. You also want it to stay kind of centered.

Now, I like to look for the side; if the soil goes too high, then just kind of take that off.

So what I’ll do is just take a handful of soil, put it around, and keep doing this process until I get it back to where it needs to be, and then I can gently tap it down to get some of the air out.

Now I want to check the sides here, and if you look, this is what I was talking about with that old pot that sunk a little bit. So I’m going to put some of that soil back around. You want to do this gently because you don’t want to shock the plant. And then you can also tamp it down a little as you go, and that will help the soil stay in there.

Now, what you can do is wait to water. You don’t want to water right away; let it settle in. So I want to make sure that this pot is on the center here because this one is quite wide. It’s heavy enough that it won’t fall over if you let it rest a little bit, but I do want to make sure that it’s centered.

Now, one of the things I did forget to mention is if you do have a big plant and you know you’re going to have to keep watering it a lot for a little while, it’s good to put it on a tray or something to catch the extra water, but generally, I like to wait a week after I repot before I water again just to allow the roots to settle in.

Okay, that looks good. I can even push the soil down a little bit more if I need to.

Now that we’ve done that, I will show you how to keep a plant that is needing revival just for a few tips. The first thing is you want to keep it in a well-lit area but not direct light. You want to put it where it can get bright but not direct sunlight for a little while while it gets used to its new pot. That is really important.

The second thing is you want to keep an eye on it because while it’s in this little period where it’s not taking up much water, it may need a little less water than normal, so just keep an eye on that.

You also want to make sure that you don’t fertilize right away. You want to give it a good month or so before you start fertilizing again because you don’t want to stress those roots too much.

Well, that looks good; we did it! So this is how you revive a heart leaf philodendron.

I hope you enjoyed this video! Be sure to subscribe, and check out all my other videos that have more great tips on houseplant care.

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